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The other is a tart shot at recreating the magic of a long-decaying hit – in this case, Desperate Housewives – substituting a satire of Texas’ 1 percenters for Housewives’ broad swipe at middle class suburbia.

But what NBC’s Awake and ABC’s GCB have most in common is their appearance late in the 2011-12 TV season – a third-quarter Hail Mary pass, aimed at bringing ambitious new series to viewers outside the chaos of the typical fall debuts.

Kudos to NBC for even trying Awake, a drama centered on a cop who gets into a car accident with his family and recovers to learn that, in one reality, his wife died in the crash and in another, his son perished. Each time he goes to sleep in one scenario, he wakes up in another, eventually slipping on color-coded wristbands to keep track of where he is.

The central question here, of course, is whether our hero cop Michael Britten (the always compelling Harry Potter vet Jason Isaacs) is confusing dreams with reality or actually living in two worlds. And if he is dreaming one of them (not likely, in my humble opinion), which one is real?

There’s two reasons this setup almost works. The format allows Britten to chase similar crimes in each reality, sprinkling clues across the two different scenarios in ways which keeps viewers guessing. The biggest challenge for new cop shows is to present plausible mysteries in ways an increasingly savvy audience cannot anticipate; since the hero here solves his puzzles using clues from two worlds, the audience has a tough time vaulting ahead.

The second reason Awake almost works is its cast and pedigree. Howard Gordon, mastermind behind Fox’s 24 and Showtime’s Homeland, is an executive producer, while Isaacs – a Brit with a talent for vaguely East Coast sounding American accents – is joined by TV vets Cherry Jones (24), Wilmer Valderrama (That ‘70s Show), Steve Harris (The Practice), B.D. Wong (Law & Order: SVU) and Laura Innes (ER).

The result is a superbly-acted drama which remains compelling, even when the plot gets creaky. And insinuations of a Grand Conspiracy behind Britten’s car accident are the creakiest of conventions, as is the crazy/not crazy question already used to diminishing effect in CBS’ A Gifted Man.

See the full debut episode below:

ABC’s GCB suffers none of those issues, centered on a former Mean Girl forced to go back to her Dallas hometown when her husband dies in a car crash while cheating on her, amid revelations he was a Bernie Madoff-style financial swindler.

If that setup tells you anything, it’s that no joke is too big for this Texas-sized show, which casts Leslie Bibb (Iron Man) as Amanda Vaughn, the humiliated widow who tries to change her life, only to find the girls she wronged in high school remain a dysfunctional quartet aimed at revenge.

The humor is a bit more exaggerated and absurdist than Desperate Housewives, and the creators are taking a gamble by making the four female friends in the show – led by Kristin Chenoweth – the villains. And the show’s dithering over its name, which was originally Good Christian B------, then Good Christian Belles and now the incomprehensible GCB, hints at the kind of pulled comedic punches which always hobble network TV comedies.

Chenoweth and her cronies spout Bible verses and attend church while plotting against their former classmate, who must fend off some of their husbands and a materialistic mother who seems airlifted from a Real Housewives: Dallas episode.

Like most network TV, it’s contrived, broad and stereotypical. It apes the female-centered, soap opera-style rhythms of Desperate Housewives, while blowing them up to Texas-size proportions; I’m skeptical that adds up to a series worthy of replacing it, when Housewives ends its run in May.

Still Awake and GCB show network TV is capable of trying something different and ambitious when its back is against the wall.

Only wish they didn’t make us wait until the end of the TV season to actually see it.